In the following essay, Haberstroh maintains that Redburn was written as a haven from his precarious emotional state following the publication of Mardi.

Redburn was written in part to help Melville avoid the bankruptcy toward which he was heading in 1849. After the financially disastrous “‘fogs’ of Mardi,”1 Melville needed to write novels that would have a broader popular appeal. A realistic treatment of the merchant service could (and did) re-establish Melville's credit. But Redburn is probably as much the end product of a suicidal crisis as of economic necessity; in his fourth novel, Melville took a very important step away from the destructive emotional state he was evidently in during the last stages of composing Mardi.

As Norman Tabachnik has pointed out, Melville's writing in general shows “a mood of depression and affects equivalent to those...